Central to this paper is a survey held among Dutch scientists in 1951 after the publication of the first UNESCO Statement on Race. The Statement, issued by a committee of experts at UNESCO, was a condemnation of scientific racism and declared that race was a social myth. The statement led to strong international criticism from physical anthropologists and geneticists, because they disagreed with the dismissal of the concept of race and because they felt poorly represented on the committee of experts. This paper traces the reception of the first Declaration on Race among scientists in the Netherlands to demonstrate how the Statement’s impact differed in different contexts. The survey about the Statement organized by Dutch anthropologists shows how Dutch racial scientists used the Statement to distance themselves from Nazi racial science by employing a rhetoric of humility, insistence on the difference between scientific findings and moral choices, suggestions for alternative conceptualizations of race, and a strategic internationalism to connect with the international community of experts. The success of this strategy can be concluded from the fact that one of the organizers of the Dutch survey, physical anthropologist Rudolf Bergman, was invited, very last minute, to participate in the expert meeting of biological scientists that formulated a second UNESCO Statement on Race, issued a year after the first.
In 1950, five years after its founding, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published its first Statement on Race, one of its initial major efforts to combat racism and disseminate scientific facts.
UNESCO took the allegations of conceptual weakness seriously and convened a second meeting of scientists, this time inviting a preponderance of geneticists and physical anthropologists. In 1951, it published a second Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences. The second Statement, like the first, stated that cultural, national and religious groups should not be confused with racial groups and emphasized that all people should be treated equally. However, in the second statement, race was restored as a valid concept and defined as an ‘anthropological classification showing definite combinations of physical (including physiological) traits in characteristic proportions’. The declaration remained inconclusive about the relationship between race and mental and social aspects, but the hope was that future genetic and anthropological studies would clarify this matter.
The two Declarations on Race have played an important role in the history of post-World War science and race. Historians now emphasize that the two declarations signal a ‘decisive transition in the scientific community from a presumption of racial inequality to a presumption of racial equality’, in the words of Perrin Selcer.
One of the signatories to the second, 1951, Statement on Race was Rudolf Bergman, a physical anthropologist from the Netherlands. He received a telegram from project leader Alfred Métraux at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on 1 June 1951 containing an invitation to the expert meeting that was to discuss the content of the declaration, scheduled to commence only three days later. The other experts invited to the meeting were well-known international geneticists and biologists like anthropologist Harry Shapiro and geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky. Rudolf Bergman never attained this degree of international fame with his scientific work. So how did he end up on the list of signatories to the famous Second Statement on Race? And why was he invited at such short notice?
The short answer to Bergman’s invitation to Paris in 1951 is that the Dutch Anthropological Society [Nederlands Genootschap voor Anthropologie], in conjunction with the Dutch UNESCO Centre, had organized a survey among Dutch scientists asking them to what extent they agreed with the first declaration.
In this article, we use this episode to examine how scientists in the Netherlands, especially those specialized in race, reflected on the concept of race after the Second World War. We show that the UNESCO Declaration presented an opportunity these scientists used to distance themselves from racial science as it was propagated in Nazi Germany. We have discerned four strategies that they adopted: First, they used a rhetoric of humility, arguing that research on race was still in its infancy, much was still unknown, and that physical anthropology was a descriptive science. The last argument links to the second strategy, the insistence on a difference between scientific findings and political or moral choices. This strategy was used to explain the differences between ‘normal science’ and ‘Nazi science’, in which, supposedly, scientists and politicians had abused science that was itself neutral. Third, although there was little agreement about what exactly race was and this was an ongoing discussion, Dutch scientists used several different versions of race to suggest new, less tainted avenues of research. Finally, the UNESCO Declaration provided an occasion for Dutch scientists to connect with the international community of experts on this topic and its message of scientific universalism. They also hoped to convince this international community that the Dutch had something to say on matters of race and science. We call this strategy strategic internationalism. In the following sections, we follow Dutch racial scientists’ reactions to the publication of the Statements and indicate the different strategies wherever they are discernible.
This Dutch reaction to the first UNESCO statement and the story of their involvement in the second, shows, as Sebastián Gil-Riaño has recently argued, that the (first) Statement ‘appears more like a tangled crossroads than a discrete signpost’ and that its message was received and recycled differently in different parts of the world.
UNESCO was founded in 1945 with the aim to contribute to peace and security through educational, scientific and cultural programs. Its objective was to overcome racism and prejudice by access to education, by advancing knowledge, and by conserving the heritage of history and science. As Jenny Bangham notes, UNESCO saw science as ‘an instrument for the promotion of social harmony’.
The Statement on Race was conceptualized as an authoritative declaration that represented the latest and universal scientific insights. It was seen, in the words of Brattain, as a ‘final authoritative rebuttal to Nazi-style scientific racism’ and was based on an optimistic view that internationalism, science, and education could wipe the slate clean.
The expert meeting that drafted the first Statement on Race was attended by sociologists, anthropologists and one philosopher. The group included an African-American scientist, and Brazilian, Indian and Mexican participants as well as three Jews. Its best-known contributor was Ashley Montagu, the
The Statement declared that the concept of race as it was used by most people was a social construct, that there were no inferior or superior races, and that there were no differences in mental capacities between humans.
The Statement was given wide international coverage. UNESCO estimated that ‘133 news stories, 62 articles and editorials, 6 full reportages’ and another ‘50 to 70 mentions’ had been published.
The majority of the responses focused on the distinction between race as a biological and a social concept, the relationship between racial differences and mental abilities (that the declaration said did not exist), and the assertion that biological studies showed that human beings are predestined to universal brotherhood, dismissed by commentators as wishful thinking rather than scientific fact. But, as Perrin Selcer notes, the responses also showed that the ‘conflicts over the race statements were disputes over scientific authority’ as much as they were about race.
Human differences had been a subject of scientific inquiry since the seventeenth century and this research intensified with the obsession with quantification in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Netherlands had a long tradition of research on race, and the 1930s had been an especially fruitful decade in that respect, both in its homeland on the North Sea and in its colonies.
A good example of the racial scientists of this period is the anatomist J.A.J. Barge, who regularly lectured on race and mental character. Barge would later gain some fame with his lecture against Nazi racial science on the day the University of Leiden was closed by the Germans in 1940. Barge argued that race was a strictly anthropological category used to define human diversity, and that linking physical and mental characteristics was reprehensible. As long as anthropology did not give definite answers, Barge argued, Christian values should guide moral conduct, an example of the strategy of distinguishing scientific from moral judgements.
In the immediate post-war period, racial scientists in the Netherlands continued to do what they had been doing before the war. Physical anthropologist Arie de Froe, for example, had fabricated official documents during the war to ‘prove’ scientifically that Jewish individuals were in fact not, or only a small percentage of them, of the Jewish race, to keep them out of the hands of the Germans. Yet he continued his morphological studies of race after the war.
After the publication of the Statement on Race, however, these scientists suddenly found themselves targeted as a profession and were called upon to defend themselves. In the Netherlands, the publication of the Statement on Race on 18 July 1950 immediately caught the attention of several newspapers. A few short news articles were devoted to the event on the same day the statement was published. In these articles, the content of the statement was copied, as was the claim that this was the most authoritative publication to do with race ever produced.
UNESCO stated that the international reaction ‘in South Africa and (…) other countries, especially in Holland, has not been good’.
Victor Koningsberger, biologist and then director of the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, also had doubts about the UNESCO Statement. At the meeting of the Utrecht Province Society for the Arts and Sciences [Provinciaal Utrechtsch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen], of which he was the president, he argued that, although UNESCO might be right to conclude that racial discrimination should be terminated, this was making the same mistake as the Nazis, namely: making science political. ‘In my opinion’, he wrote, ‘only one answer to Unesco should have been heard from biological circles: hands off’. Koningsberger argued that moral decisions should be based on moral values not on biology, again assuming the possibility of making a clear distinction between the two.
The Groningen professor of genetics M.J. Sirks used his inaugural lecture as Chancellor of the University to admonish those whose judgement was being ‘clouded by sentimental considerations and economic self-interest’, who denied ‘the existence of difference in mental ability between the peoples of the world’. This group included the members of the UNESCO race committee who had ‘with a confident but entirely unfounded optimism’ declared that, given the same environment, members of all human groups would perform in a similar manner.
To distinguish his own brand of science from that of the Germans, he said that the ‘Race Question’ was a dangerous matter because it led to ‘self-glorification’ and ‘misleading racial propaganda’.
Others like the sociologist Wim Wertheim sided with the first Statement. ‘Is it not grotesque’ [potsierlijk], he wrote about Sirks’ lecture, ‘that a professor brands renowned scholars, representing different branches of science, who contributed to the well-known UNESCO Statement on Race, incompetent and apparently thinks that we shall accept him on his own authority’.
In 1951 a survey, co-organized by the Dutch Anthropological Society and the UNESCO Centre, was held to collect all the different opinions among professors in the Netherlands.
The Dutch Anthropological Society considered the UNESCO Declaration relevant to Dutch scientific circles and this was, we argue, a case of strategic internationalism: an opportunity to hitch on to discussions taking place in the wider scientific world. Because UNESCO presented itself as a new platform for scientific discussions, in which international, and even universal, agreements on contentious topics could be reached, it was important that the Dutch participate in this scientific discussion. In organizing the survey, it showcased the UNESCO Statement as an important issue, and tried to claim a place at the international scientific table by producing a systematic answer to the Statement, thereby hoping to be heard on the international stage.
Two board members of the Dutch Anthropological Society, Professor Rudolf Bergman and Dr Adèle van Bork-Feltkamp, and the Centre’s first chairman, E. Alderse Baes, translated the first UNESCO Statement into Dutch and sent this translation and their questions about it to all Dutch professors and to members of the Anthropological Society.
The starting point, the questionnaire stated, was that there were strong objections to the Statement in the Netherlands. The board of the Society believed that the race question had a biological foundation while the roots of racial discrimination lay elsewhere. Therefore the premise of the survey was the distinction between science and politics/morality. Scientists were asked to give their opinion on three questions: a. Do you agree with the spirit of the Statement? b. Do you agree with its argumentation? c. Do you have any additional information that clarifies the problem?
Seventy-nine responses were elicited from the Dutch scientific community: twenty each from Utrecht and Amsterdam, fifteen from Leiden and the rest from Groningen, Nijmegen, The Hague, Wageningen, Delft, Maastricht and Tilburg. Half the contributions were from the natural sciences (medicine, biology, genetics and mathematics) and half from the humanities (literature & philosophy, social sciences and law). Sixty-eight out of seventy-nine answered question A. in the affirmative, five respondents did not agree with the spirit of the Statement. Some scholars felt the statement was ‘too emotional in its expression’, ‘not realistic enough’ or ‘more like a wish than the ascertaining of a fact’.
Although the message of the statement was generally well received, with very few exceptions, its scientific argumentation was criticized by all respondents. Many scientists took issue with the use of the word ‘ethnic group’ instead of ‘race’, because ethnic groups were considered groups who shared culture, language or religion, not genes or physical traits. Any ban on the word race while it was so widely used was thought to be very confusing.
The report on the results of the survey included several conclusions. It said that generally speaking there was disapproval of the combination of scientific and ethical arguments and hence the report advised that these be kept separate. It also argued that the inability of scientists up to that moment to demonstrate racial difference in terms of character and temperament did not necessarily mean that all races were the same in this respect. This contention was a combination of the strategy of humility and an insistence that human differences should not be entirely ignored. The report warned against easy generalizations and advocated that new research, both biological and sociological, needed to be done. These thoughts reveal the similarity between the Dutch ideas and the British criticism in
The committee that set up the survey and wrote the report, Van Bork-Feltkamp, Bergman and Alderse Baes, also added its own recommendations. They too emphasized that ethical and scientific arguments should be kept separate. They concluded that ‘the mixing of scientific and ethical arguments is generally disapproved of. Giving each of these arguments its full value, it seems better to distinguish them categorically.’
In terms of future research, the committee saw great promise in the investigation of constitutional types, Bergman’s interest, and, as we saw earlier, also one of Sirks’. Systematic research into comparative psychology, although challenging because of the difficulty in finding comparable groups and tests, was also suggested as an option. The third avenue the committee suggested was historical research that, the report hinted, would lead to the conclusion that, compared to other people, the ‘Aryans’ did not score very highly on the scale of historical successes.
Unfortunately, the authors of this paper have been unable to find the original responses to the survey. In the archives of Gerard Tichelman, a colonial civil servant and self-taught ethnologist, is a letter inviting Tichelman to submit his reaction and the text of the declaration with his annotations. Tichelman scribbled several lines next to the suggestion to drop entirely the word race, which hints that he was one of those who criticized this dismissal of the term. Even more lines can be found next to the sentence ‘‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth’. The most succinct of his remarks is in the margin where the Statement writes, ‘There is no evidence that race mixture as such produces bad results from the biological point of view’. ‘On the contrary!’, was Tichelman’s reaction.
One other letter has been kept in the archives. It contains the response of Father Gregorius (original name: Lambertus Johannes Maria van den Boom), who taught cultural anthropology in Tilburg and had taken physical anthropology classes in the 1930s.
The results of the survey in the Netherlands show a scientific community that felt the Statement was important enough to discuss and also considered their own opinions relevant to the larger international discussions, something on which the initiators of the survey also insisted. The responses ranged from agreement with the spirit of the report to extreme scepticism. And, as in the first reactions to the statements, the respondents considered strategies like the insistence on a difference between science and ethics, on the provisional state of much research and on specific conceptualizations of race that the respondents considered quite promising, whereas the aim of the Statement was to eradicate them all.
The report of the survey had been drafted in part at least by Rudolf Bergman, because it is thoroughly permeated with his stamp. Bergman was a Dutch anthropologist (and herpetologist) who although he had been appointed to a professorship at the University of Amsterdam was hardly a scholar of note. Soon after finishing his medical studies in Amsterdam, Bergman moved to the Dutch East Indies in 1928 to become a lecturer at the Netherlands Indies Medical School (NIAS) in Surabaya, moving on a few years later to the Medical School in Batavia (present-day Jakarta). After the Independence of Indonesia, Bergman was forced to return to the Netherlands, where he became a physical anthropologist at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. On behalf of the Institute, Bergman was appointed a professor in tropical anthropology at the University of Amsterdam in 1949.
In his inaugural lecture delivered just three months before the first UNESCO Statement, Bergman did dismiss the racial ideas of the Germans and of the Japanese but insisted that the denial of difference was the wrong way to tackle problems between people; an argument in the same category as calling the ‘ethic of universal brotherhood’ wishful thinking. He believed that differences did exist in work performance and intellect, but he added the disclaimer that, as such topics were hard to research as social circumstances varied so much between people, it was better not to generalize on the matter.
The Dutch report of the survey heavily featured two of Bergman’s interests: constitutional types and historical research. Bergman used both types of research plus physical anthropology in his studies of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the (in)famous Dutch East India Company official. He drew a portrait of Coen’s constitution, as ‘it is not only the measurable physical characteristics that follow the laws of heredity.’
It is unlikely that the organizers of the Statement on Race had heard of Bergman’s studies on the physique and skeleton of Coen. His name does not feature in the correspondence between the organizers about whom to invite, even though they did their very best to find scientists from outside the US and the UK. By March or April UNESCO had already invited the majority of its scholars and Bergman’s name was not on the list of participants drawn up on 1 June. However, the sources suggest that the Netherlands staged a last-minute drive to be invited, a final attempt at strategic internationalism. The report of the Dutch survey was dated 19 May 1951, hence it was sent to UNESCO only after that date. On 30 May, the hitherto rather flaccid Dutch National UNESCO Committee sent UNESCO a letter asking information about a forthcoming conference on race problems. ‘As you may know’, it said, ‘the various documents on race problems are being studied by Netherlands experts who have experience in the field of anthropology.’
This light pressure exerted on UNESCO was successful. Bergman’s invitation was very last-minute: Van Bork-Feltkamp received a telegram from Alfred Métraux on 1 June 1951, just three days before the expert meeting was scheduled to begin. It was sent to the address of the Netherlands Anthropological Society, rather than to Bergman’s office at the Royal Tropical Institute, so it was clearly an answer to Van Bork-Feltkamp’s telegram.
The second expert meeting was composed of geneticists and physical anthropologists only (although Ashley Montagu later joined) and discussed the conclusions that had been reached in their fields concerning race. We know little about what Bergman contributed to the discussions because there are no detailed minutes of the meeting, but in his own account of the meeting, Bergman recorded that several paragraphs in the statement, for instance, on definitions of race, led to discussions: The Swedish geneticist Gunnar Dahlberg, for example, argued one single gene could separate one race from another, whereas others preferred to use the term race for the largest human groups. Other topics were less contentious. The conference exhibited a common discomfort with the term ‘ethnic group’ and felt that this should be omitted from the new statement, despite the fact that the entire committee thought that the world ‘race’ had been abused. The participants also agreed that there was no biological problem with racial mixing; they even stressed that pure races had never existed, hence there would have been no ‘pure races’ to be lost in the mixing.
Bergman himself writes that he could add to the discussions about temperament and character in Paragraphs 11 and 12 in the first statement, categories he preferred to define as to emotions (temperament) and activities (character). However, these paragraphs did not make it into the second statement, nor are any traces of Bergman’s interest in historical studies or constitution visible in it. Bergman claimed that one important point he had made was to insist to the contrary when Professor Zuckerman said that it had never been proven that people of different races could live together peaceably. In his refutation he described the Dutch experience in the Netherlands East Indies and the Caribbean colonies, that he apparently thought had been positive.
Rapporteur L.C. Dunn wrote that the committee did reach common ground on many subjects. However, its members did not succeed in finding a new word for ‘race’, but insisted that race should be used in a stricter anthropological sense. They also failed, noted Dunn, to reach unanimity about the nature of man in respect to his ‘behaviour toward his fellows’.
The 1951 Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences still retained an anti-racist stance but is more distanced, more biological and less ethical. The conclusion the second statement shared with the first was a general belief that there were no fixed groups, but that humankind knew diversity because of the distribution of its genes, which were subject to evolutionary change. Both documents also stated that cultural, national and religious groups should not be confused with racial groups and emphasized that all people should be treated equally.
In a radio interview after his return, Bergman explained that one of the Statement’s most important conclusions, in his opinion, was a definition of race and an insistence that religious, linguistic and national groups were not races. ‘So Jews or Americans or Muslims are not races?’ asked the interviewer, to which he answered no. ‘Do you think racial mixing is undesirable?’ was another question. ‘There is no biological reason to oppose race mixing’, answered Bergman. ‘Of course there might be some social difficulties but we must remember that, as social structures change, this factor too will change’.
The first and second Statements paved the way for two standpoints that would each continue to be influential among different groups: that of race as a social construct and that of race as a legitimate scientific category worthy of further study. In the Netherlands, the Statement did have some immediate political impact: in the discussion on the future of New Guinea, for example, the argument that Papuans were a different race from Indonesians commonly cropped up but, after the publication of the first UNESCO Statement, Dutch politicians decided that the race argument should be avoided in future publications, ‘as it could be interpreted by the international community as a form of discrimination’.
For scientists in the Netherlands who were working on race, the first Statement offered an opportunity to join in an international discussion on the definition and role of race in science. We call this a case of strategic internationalism, because becoming part of an international discussion gave Dutch scientists several advantages. It was an opportunity to be heard and become known internationally and the fact that the Dutch took active steps to join the second meeting means that they really saw a role for themselves there. It also showed the Dutch public that Dutch racial scientists were taken seriously by international organizations. The authority of UNESCO itself was never called into question, and it gave Dutch race scientists the opportunity to show that race was considered a valid research topic.
Other strategies striving to present race as a valid and innocent object of research are discernible in the discussion. There was the rhetoric of humility that presented racial science as a science that was merely collecting data and still unable to come with grand claims about mankind. Linked to this, most respondents to the Dutch survey argued that racial science should be separated from the political and moral ideas on which some people (Nazis) wanted to base them. Several definitions of race were debated, with many different nuances: differences based on one gene or many, in- or excluding mental characteristics or on quantifiable or more holistic features, as Bergman suggested. The latter approach did not gain much popularity in the years that followed. Physical anthropology and genetics on the other hand continued their work in much the same vein as before.
The authors would like to thank David Baneke and Jeltsje Stobbe for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
UNESCO, Statement on Race, Paris, July 1950.
Perrin Selcer, ‘Beyond the Cephalic Index: Negotiating Politics to produce UNESCO’s Scientific Statements on Race’,
Jenny Bangham, for example, argues that ‘genetics was established in the postwar decade as a seemingly purified, universally applicable and politically neutral way of understanding human difference and ancestry’. J. Bangham, ‘What Is Race? UNESCO, Mass Communication and Human Genetics in the Early 1950s’,
Michelle Brattain, ‘Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public’,
The Nederlands Genootschap voor Anthropologie had existed since 1949 when the Nederlandsche Anthropologische Vereeniging merged with the Nederlandsch Nationaal Bureau voor Anthropologie. See J.J. de Wolf,
Sebastián Gil-Riaño, ‘Relocating Anti-racist Science: the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race and Economic Development in the Global South’.
Bangham, ‘What Is Race?’ (n. 4) 82.
Julian Huxley,
Brattain, ‘Race, Racism, and Antiracism’, 1386. For other accounts of the Declarations on Race see Donna Haraway,
Selcer, ‘Beyond the Cephalic Index’ (n. 3) 175.
Nadine Weidman, ‘An Anthropologist on TV: Ashley Montagu and the Biological Basis of Human Nature, 1945–1960’, in: Mark Solovey & Hamilton Cravens,
Brattain, ‘Race, Racism, and Antiracism’ (n. 10), 1393.
Ibidem, 1397.
UNESCO,
Quoted by Bangham, ‘What Is Race?’, 85.
W. Fagg, ‘Unesco on racialism. Letter to the Times’,
‘U.N.E.S.C.O. on race’,
UNESCO,
‘U.N.E.S.C.O. on race’, 138.
Carleton Coon to Mrs. Dees, February 8, 1961, Carlton Coon Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Suitland, Md, quoted by Brattain, ‘Race, Racism, and Antiracism’, 1399.
Selcer, ‘Beyond the Cephalic Index’ (n. 3) s173. See for this argument also G. Schaffer,
Some classics are: S.J. Gould,
Smith,
Fenneke Sysling, ‘Geographies of Difference. Dutch Physical Anthropology in the Colonies and the Netherlands’,
H. Biervliet et al, ‘Biologisme, racisme en eugenetiek in de antropologie en de sociologie van de jaren dertig’, in: F. Bovenkerk et al. (eds.),
A. Ascher and D. Cohen (eds.),
I. Mok, ‘Een beladen erfenis: het raciale vertoog in de sociale wetenschap in Nederland 1930–1950’, in: M. Eickhoff, B. Henkes and F. van Vree (eds.),
S. Broere, ‘Synthesis and Race: Barge, Buytendijk, and the rassenvraagstuk of the 1930s’,
F. van Vree, ‘Ras, volk en cultuur. Andere perspectieven op wetenschappelijke tradities’, in: M. Eickhoff, B. Henkes, F. van Vree (eds.),
H.U. Jessurun d’Oliveira (ed.),
Selcer, ‘Beyond the Cephalic Index’ (n. 3) 2175.
This statement was, for instance, published in the Dutch newspapers:
UNESCO Archives, Paris, 323. 12A 102; Statement on Race. Part II, 68: Alfred Métraux to Ashley Montagu, March 2, 1951, Unesco Papers, quoted in Brattain, ‘Race, Racism, and Antiracism’, 1398.
UNESCO Archives, Paris, 323. 12A 102; Statement on Race. Part II: Correspondence, A. Métraux to the editor of Elsevier Weekblad, 27 February 1951.
J.A. van Hamel, ‘Unesco en de schim van Gobineau’,
J.A. van Hamel, ‘Nederlandsche indrukken van een reis door Indië’,
V.J. Koningsberger, ‘Biologie en samenleving’, in:
M.J. Sirks,
H.W. Methorst and M.J. Sirks,
Ibidem, 141.
Ibidem, 145–151. He also emphasized the importance of biology over environment on personal development. See ‘M.J. Sirks, ‘De mens als biologisch object’, in: M.J. Sirks, G. Kraus, P.J. Bauman et al.,
W.F. Wertheim, ‘Intelligentieverschillen in het licht der sociologie’,
W.F. Wertheim,
Sirks,
J.J. van Loghem, ‘Gelijkwaardigheid der rassen van Homo sapiens in discussie’,
‘Unesco-centrum in de hoofdstad: studenten namen het initiatief tot de oprichting’,
De Wolf,
Leiden Special Collections DH 1456, Archief van het Nederlands Genootschap voor Antropologie, Nederlandse Ethnologenkring, Nederlandse sociologische vereniging (niet-Westerse sectie), hun voorgangers en rechtsopvolgers, en verwante instellingen [Archive of the Dutch Anthropological Society, the Dutch Ethnologists Circle, the Dutch Sociological Association (non-western section), their predecessors and successors and related institutes], 46.
The translation itself was later criticized: ‘De verklaring van de UNESCO over rassenproblemen’,
Leiden Special Collections DH 1456, 46, Report of the Survey, 2.
Ibidem, 1.
Ibidem, 2.
Ibidem.
Ibidem.
Ibidem, 4.
Leiden Special Collections DH 1456, 46, Report of the Survey, 5–6.
Special Collections Leiden, Tichelman collection, DH 814, 1208.
G.L. Tichelman,
Father Gregorius is the person who sent the archive of the Dutch Ethnologists Circle to the H1456 archive in the Special Collections in Leiden, so it is possible that he personally added the letter with his response to the UNESCO folder. This explains why his letter is the only one to survive.
Leiden Special Collections, DH 1456, 46, letter Father Gregorius to the board, 1.
D. van Duuren et al.,
R.A.M. Bergman,
Bergman,
R.A.M. Bergman, ‘Jan Pieterszoon Coen: een psychographie: bijdrage tot de leer der constitutietypen’,
‘Jan Pieterszoon Coen. De overbrenging van het gevonden gebeente’,
Secretary Dutch National UNESCO Committee to the Director-General of UNESCO, 30 May 1951, UNESCO Archives 323.12 A 102/064 (44) “51”.
UNESCO Archives, 323.12 A 102/064 (44) “51”.
National Archives (NA), The Hague, Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) Archives: 4518: ‘Telegram Métraux to Van Bork-Feltkamp’.
NA, KIT archives, 4518, ‘Kort verslag van mijn reis naar Parijs’ [Report of my journey to Paris], 1951, 1.
Ibidem, 2.
Ibidem, 3.
L.C. Dunn,
Alfred Métraux, ‘U.N.E.S.C.O.’s New Statement on Race: The Provisional Text’,
Among those who were invited to comment on the second Statement were two scientists from the Netherlands: Arie de Froe and R. Remmelts (Instituut voor praeventieve geneeskunde, University of Leiden) but UNESCO did not receive their reactions.
Tracy Teslow,
NA, KIT archives, 4518: ‘Bijvoegsel reisverslag naar Parijs van 4–8 Juni’ [addendum to travelogue].
Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, ‘Beyond the ‘Trauma of Decolonisation’: Dutch Cultural Diplomacy during the West New Guinea Question (1950–62)’,
R.J.M. Mok,
M. Roede, ‘Rassen, waan of werkelijkheid. Met aandacht voor het verzetswerk van Arie de Froe’, in H.U. Jessurun d’Oliveira (ed.),